Finally caught up with The Martian this weekend, and it was for better or worse pretty much exactly what I expected of it. It did a competent job of translating a dense, plot heavy novel into an entertaining piece of science fiction movie making. Matt Damon’s performance was excellent, and really captured the Mark Watney’s essential can do spirit, while also managing to round out what is a fairly flat and static character in the book. My biggest complaint for the adaptation was the look of it, which is very much that of a late-period Ridley Scott movie. The space suits, the habitats, the ships and the equipment all have just a bit too much of movie magic for my tastes. None of it has the drab, utilitarian look of products designed and constructed by committee.

The novel is an entertaining slab of problem solving, a book essentially about process. It’s told mostly in the first person, by a character undergoing a tremendous amount of stress and being somewhat glib about the situation to cope. That, of course, is perhaps a generous reading. I haven’t read anything else by Weir, but his prose in this novel is serviceable. I think that may come across as a damning with faint praise, but it’s really not. The pleasures of the book aren’t sensuous, and there’s no need for lyrical reveries – especially when they wouldn’t fit in with the character anyway.

And as in any adaptation of a novel into a film, they are forced to drop a lot of incidents and problems. Most of the time, when characters and subplots are dropped, I think it’s either for the best or at least indifferent (hello, Tom Bombadil). However, the pleasures of this particular book are so wrapped up in the way Watney walks us through his problem solving that seeing fewer of those instances on the film was something of a letdown. I think for anyone who hasn’t read the novel, this isn’t going to be a problem – there are enough problems for people to be wrapped up in that most folks won’t notice. The filmmakers definitely respected what the novel was in making their version of it.

But sitting and watching it this weekend, I was struck by the idea that this might have been better served with a smaller budget and a longer run time. Syfy Channel (ugh, I hate that name) has recently been adapting James S. A. Corey’s The Expanse novel series into a well-received adaptation. I watched the first episode and enjoyed it, and I’ve read the books and enjoyed them quite a bit as well. I’m looking forward to checking out the series further. But The Expanse is the kind of grand scale space opera that would really benefit from a big screen, big budget adaptation, where The Martian is a small story, told in only a few locations – a habitat, the deserts of Mars, and a few JPL meeting rooms – that a modest budget could handle. It seems a shame to me that a small story that calls out for a modest budget gets the Ridley Scott treatment, while a bigger, much more expansive story is confined to cable. Ah, well.

Straight Outta Compton is a biopic, with all of the attendant problems and pleasures that that entails. The film is also uniquely compromised by being actively produced and stewarded by its (living) subjects and families. Hell, one of the characters is played by that character’s actual, real life son. There is absolutely no editorial distance or critical evaluation in this adaptation. This is straight hagiography, and to an unknown extent, wish fulfillment.

There is also an unintentional air of sexual menace that the film exhibits towards its often nude, seldom-named female characters. The famously egregious “bye, Felicia” scene especially comes across as cruel, adolescent wish fulfilment. The scenes of debauchery and excess are played for either laughs or in wide-eyed admiration.

Once the film brings all of its characters together at the end of the first act, there’s a long sequence of NWA at the top of their game, interspersed with a few broad bits of foreshadowing. After that, the film breaks into three parallel stories: Ice Cube’s burgeoning solo and acting career (here summarized by Cube congratulating himself on Friday’s still-being-written screenplay), Dr. Dre’s move from Ruthless to Death Row, and his relationship with Suge Knight, and Eazy-E’s relationship with Jerry Heller. MC Ren and DJ Yella, here as in real life, are mostly background players.

I found Jason Mitchell and Paul Giamatti’s relationship in the film to be easily the most emotionally resonant thing in the film, and the most compromised, in a way that seems to speak to the problems with biopics generally, and this film in particular. Eazy-E is obviously dead, and Jerry Heller has been in litigation with the surviving members of NWA on and off for the last twenty-five years. To the extent of what we know about Eazy-E and Heller’s relationship, it is here filtered through the perception of people who are antagonistic towards Heller, and with a vested interest in making him look as bad as possible. Eazy-E himself is presented as young, vulnerable man who allowed a surrogate father figure to take advantage of him, and by extension his friends, the ones he should really have been looking out for.

And yet, mostly through the acting of Mitchell and Giamatti, I more or less bought the relationship. I don’t know that I believe it, in the sense that I don’t know the truth behind it, but by being dead, Eazy-E is allowed to be emotionally and narratively vulnerable in a way that Dre and Cube won’t allow their on-screen doppelgangers to be. Both move from strength to strength, with occasional violent outbursts to assert their masculine dominance over people who have wronged them.

The close involvement of the subjects obviously means that there will be little in the way of critical distance on the characters and their actions – the obvious lack of Dre’s assault of a journalist, even as it depicts him reacting in violent rage at several points, is indicative. But when the subject turns to someone who is no longer around to be concerned with how he’s depicted, we get a glimpse of what could have been a much richer film with more distanc

I saw Ant-Man last night and found it to be a thoroughly enjoyable film, full of charming performances, especially the always charming Paul Rudd and Michael Peña, intermittently amazing special effects and a breezy, light-footed affect that served the material well. Some of the macro photography when Rudd's character shrinks to the titular ant-size is fantastic, and they make great use of the juxtaposition of the stakes of the conflict with the size of the world around it.

It also can't be ignored that Ant-Man seems to be where Marvel finally got it's act together and did something about their third act problem. The pomposity and overblown effects orgies that the third acts of most Marvel films so far has become something of a cliche, but Ant-Man manages to avoid that with two separate, but related strategies. First off, the third act actually continues the plot. Novel! In most Marvel films, the third act is an extended denouement, with the hero(es) chasing after a bad guy who has a macguffin, and needs to have it taken away from them. In Ant-Man (spoiler alert, obviously), the third act is in part an extended heist, a chase after the bad guy, and a stand off who's stakes are at once momentous for the characters (Rudd's daughter is in danger), but undercut by the film's wry juxtaposition between the ostensible stakes and the actual scale of the conflict. It's clever and satisfying that most Marvel films haven't quite managed to pull off.

Part of what I find fascinating about the ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way they've found to move away not just from the grim, dark, grimdark DC cinematic efforts like the Nolan Batman films and the atrocious Snyder-helmed Man of Steel, though that is worthy of celebration in itself. What Marvel seems to be trying to do is open up a shared universe of films that contain not just the same characters, or an ongoing story, but one where different stories are told in different registers, as best suits the material. Seems like an obvious choice, but no one has brought the kind of resources and thoughtfulness to it yet.

To that end, like last year's Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man (almost) never takes itself too seriously. It winks at the material, even if it never embraces the campiness of it the way the '60s Batman series did. It's a middle way between the two approaches, and it works very well for a character who can shrink and rides ants around.

What Marvel is doing is crossbreeding other genres with superheroes. So far, we haven't seen much in the way of great leaps. Guardians of the Galaxy was better than two thirds space opera, and Ant-Man was half two fifths heist movie. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a third paranoid conspiracy thriller. While Marvel has been fairly tentative in feeling this space out, I think there's actually a lot of room for them to do some truly fascinating things with it, especially with the upcoming slate of films.

It's interesting that for the (third) reboot of Spider-Man, Marvel is going with an actor who seems a lot younger than Andrew Garfield or Tobey Maguire. Spider-Man meets John Hughes? There's all sorts of room for Doctor Strange to be, well, strange, and Black Panther and Captain Marvel are both such fascinating properties that go against the established grain of superhero films, they could be really fascinating.

Of course, all of this could just totally collapse. Marvel's track record so far has been pretty great, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it will continue to be that way. Certainly, Edgar Wright's departure from Ant-Man was a less than positive sign. Marvel needs to ensure that they can continue to pull in talented, interesting directors, writers and performers with unique visions for their characters, and make sure that those people aren't stifled under the weight of MCU-service. That might prove a tricky maneuver to pull off, especially as the universe starts to expand and grow. But it'll be interesting to see where they go with it.